Colonizing Earth with the Life of Heaven

  The resurrection stories in the gospels aren't about going to heaven when you die. In fact, there is almost nothing about "going to heaven when you die" in the whole New Testament. Being "citizens of heaven" (Philippians 3:20) doesn't mean you're supposed to end up there. Many of the Philippians were Roman citizens, but Rome didn't want them back when they retired. Their job was to bring Roman culture to Philippi. 

  That's the point that all the gospels actually make, in their own ways. Jesus is risen, therefore God's new world has begun. Jesus is risen, therefore Israel and the world have been redeemed. Jesus is risen, therefore his followers have a new job to do. 

  And what is that new job? To bring the life of heaven to birth in actual, physical, earthly reality. ...The bodily resurrection of Jesus is more than a proof that God performs miracles or that the Bible is true. It is more than the Christians knowing of Jesus in our own experience (that is the truth of Pentecost, not of Easter). It is much, much more than the assurance of heaven after death (Paul speaks of "going away and being with Christ," but his main emphasis is on coming back again in a risen body, to live in God's newborn creation). Jesus' resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord's Prayer is about.

  ...When Paul wrote his great resurrection chapter, I Corinthians 15, he didn't end by saying, "So let's celebrate the great future life that awaits us." He ended by saying, "So get on with your work because you know that in the Lord it won't go to waste." ...Every act of love, every deed done in Christ and by the Spirit, every work of true creativity -- doing justice, making peace, healing families, resisting temptation, seeking and winning true freedom, -- in an earthly event in a long history of things that implement Jesus' own resurrection and anticipate the final new creation and act as signposts of hope, [point] back to the first and on to the second.1

1. N. T. Wright, Surprised By Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [New York, NY: HarperCollins; 2008] pp. 293-295